History Department (University of Exeter)

Location:
Department of History
College of Humanities
University of Exeter
Stocker Road
Exeter EX4 4PY
United Kingdom

Contact:
Catherine Devenish
c.devenish[at]exeter.ac.uk

www.humanities.exeter.ac.uk/history

www.socialismgoesglobal.exeter.ac.uk

www.1989after1989.exeter.ac.uk

Description: 

The History Department at the University of Exeter is at the forefront of many areas of historical research. It draws on a wide breadth of academic expertise in diverse historical periods and geographical regions and has a number of world-leading research centres and projects, including the Leverhulme Trust-funded 1989 after 1989: Rethinking the Fall of State Socialism in Global Perspective and the Arts and Humanities Research Council supported Socialism Goes Global. Professor James Mark leads these two major research projects which interconnect to his research interests in the social and cultural history of state socialism in Central-Eastern Europe and the politics of memory during socialism and post-socialism. His research also aims to connect the region to broader global histories or processes through transnational, entangled and comparative methods.

Cold War Interests: 

| Socialism Goes Global

The project explores a much understudied nexus of Cold War history - the encounter between eastern Europe and the 'global South' - from the perspective of cultural, intellectual and social history, concentrating on themes such as race, culture, media, rights, humanitarianism, technology and mobility.

The team of researchers include: James Mark (University of Exeter, UK), Paul Betts (University of Oxford, UK), Kristin Roth-Ey (University College, London), Steffi Marung (Leipzig University, Germany), Małgorzata Mazurek (Columbia University, USA), Péter Apor (Institute of History, Hungarian Academy of Sciences), Radina Vučetić (University of Belgrade, Serbia).

They have organised conferences; workshops have considered, for example, how stories of peripheral globalisations disrupt Cold War narratives, how experts circulated knowledge within the post-war socialist world, Cold War mobility between East and South, and exchanges between Eastern Europe and Africa. The team publishes a blog and can also be found on Twitter.

The project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) of the UK and is due to run until 2018, after which the researchers expect to publish findings.

|1989 after 1989: Rethinking the Fall of State Socialism in Global Perspective

This five-year Leverhulme Trust-funded research (2014-18) aims to connect the decline, collapse and transformation of state socialism in the Soviet Union, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe to broader global processes. It supports a range of projects which explore both the global entanglements which informed this transition, and the way in which global, regional and local processes have shaped the way we have come to understand the decline and end of state socialism.

Projects supported here address the post-socialist transformation of cities, the 'Fall' and 'Rise' of human rights between the global and local, criminal justice and the production of history across regional transitions, the 'globally entangled history' of cultures of transformation, late and post-socialist elites and the rise of neo-liberalism, and the global story of Yugoslavia's collapse.

The team of researchers include: James Mark, Raluca Grosescu, Nelly Bekus, Ned Richardson-Little, Ljubica Spaskovska and Anna Calori (all University of Exeter, UK).

The project members organised a conference called "Entangled Transitions: Between Eastern and Southern Europe 1960s-2014" (December 2014) in Leuven and a workshop about "Global Socialism and Post Socialism" on May, 13th 2015 at Streatham Campus, at the University of Exeter as well as several seminars. The team publishes a blog and can also be found on Twitter and Facebook.